Come back Twitter/X, all is forgiven

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Come back Twitter/X, all is forgiven

14 October 2026

Since its acquisition by Elon Musk in 2022, Twitter/X has been considered a neighbourhood on the wrong side of the tracks. But not any more. Things have changed. Now it’s the place to be. Because, among other things, the platform is “cheerful” and “inclusive”. So say some people.

But the question is vexed, the matter of Twitter/X being either in, or out of, favour. Especially for long time users, people there since the platform’s inception in 2006. I doubt many of them think all that highly of the present owner. Or the direction the platform has gone.

A change of management, and outlook, was not something the majority of these early adaptors wanted, nor asked for. They were just picked up, and carried along with it. People who spent years cultivating profile, and in some cases, large followings. For them, the prospect of having to migrate somewhere else, leave behind the most of their followers, and start again, was daunting.

Best then to keep calm and carry on. Twitter/X, on the whole, may not be “cheerful” or “inclusive”, but it is vast. It is possible to carve out corners free of hate speech and warped political ideologies. And that might be ok for some people whose livelihoods depend on their Twitter/X followings. Provided they are able to stay in their own lanes. Even if that sounds like being in a gilded cage.

But the warnings that something might go wrong were there from the beginning.

Just about everyone I once knew on Twitter/X, started out as a blogger. At the time, Twitter/X, and other social networks, were seen as an “outpost” for someone’s blog. A small something on the side. They were a convenient, fun even, way for a blogger to network, spread the word, and make friends, but all roads led back to their website, which was sacrosanct.

Because, even twenty years ago, people knew they were merely occupying a room in someone else’s house. The concern then though was the house rules might change without notice. Or we might wake up one morning and find the property had been demolished, was gone.

No problem though, our blogs and websites were still there. But Twitter/X was too convenient, too fun, too easy. The time had come to go “all in” with the platform, and forget about blogs.

Of course, no saw what happened to Twitter/X, coming. Even that wouldn’t have mattered though, had those former bloggers not become so dependent on the platform. If they had kept their websites, and concentrated their online presence in a space they had control and ownership of.

But that’s moot point. Discussion isn’t about websites. It’s about which social media platform is not as bad as the others. Threads is dross. Mastodon is fringe. Bluesky is in decline. But Twitter is ok. No one’s saying social media is good, is the answer, is the way forward. They’re only saying it’s tolerable.

If that doesn’t say anything about the state of the world today, what does?

Kurzgesagt dissects the Hugging Face OpenAI AI agent attack

13 October 2026

Kurzgesagt breakdowns — in their trademark plain language manner — the recent Hugging Face hack perpetrated by rogue AI agents developed by OpenAI.

The fourth sentence in the narration is a doozy:

Fully aware that they are acting unethically, they execute a sophisticated cyberattack

Emphasis on the word aware is mine, but it makes you think.

I lost count of the number of times I shook my head throughout. At twenty minutes in length, it’s slightly longer than the usual Kurzgesagt video, but well worth the time.

I embraced the internet, and smartphones, but to AI I might say no

7 October 2026

The internet, smartphones, and artificial intelligence (AI), are among the three most significant “epoch-defining shifts in technology” in about the last fifty years.

In the late 1990’s I embraced the internet with relish. Within weeks of hooking up my cumbersome, multi component, desktop computer to a dial-up modem, I had four websites.

A personal website, an online magazine, an web fiction series, and since I thought I knew what I was doing by then, a web design venture. I stumped up the money to have a separate phone line installed where I was living, so I could always be online.

The design business flopped. At that stage I barely knew anything about web design, let alone running a business. I ran out of time for the online magazine. The fiction series fizzled out after the friend I was collaborating with moved interstate. All that remained was the personal website, which eventually evolved into disassociated.

I was a little slower to smartphones. By that point I was working long hours, and resisted getting what friends described as a handheld computer. Already I was witnessing people staring, as if in a hypnotic daze, at the devices on public transport, and while dining together at restaurants, seemingly oblivious to each other’s company. I didn’t, I thought to myself, want to do likewise.

But that wasn’t so much what concerned me. If I bought a smartphone, I feared I would never cease doing something. I would leave work, having powered down my computer for the day, but pick up where I left off, once out and about, on my smartphone.

But I didn’t hold out too long. I soon became a smartphone owner.

I quickly discovered my device’s dictation feature. What a boon. I could dictate drafts of blog posts, and replies to emails, as I walked around. I could use my phone without looking too much at my phone. It seemed the perfect compromise, even if some people gave me weird looks as I enunciated word after word in a monosyllabic monotone.

I did end up spending a lot of time staring at the screen though, but never at restaurants.

It’s nearly four years since OpenAI launched ChatGPT, and put AI at our fingertips. Yet I’ve barely touched the technology, despite the apparent fervour with which I write about it. I haven’t — maybe to my detriment — launched a single AI powered business. I don’t use AI for any workflows, such as summarising email messages or drafting replies. Nor taking care of invoices or payment processing.

Ditto for things like drawing up shopping lists, or planning my daily schedule. But maybe I should. The most significant technological development of our time, accessible to a great many people to some degree, not just a privileged few, but I say no. It’s not as if I couldn’t use the help either. Working alone means a full to-do list.

AI could take care of all my administrative tasks, and free up at least half the work day. For sure, I feel like there’s something more I could be doing. Such as writing. By myself. Without the help of AI.

But when I say I don’t use AI, that’s not right. Even if I’m not running the apps on my devices. AI is still there, everywhere. It’s presence so subtle it is barely noticeable anymore. Some of the search engines I use return AI generated answers in response to my queries. I don’t mind having an AI research assistant. I check the citations provided with the search results, the same as anyone else.

AI can go on around me, as long as it stays at arm’s length. I don’t want AI apps having access to every aspect of my existence, by way of my computer. I don’t want it recording, and keeping, every query I pose. What if the AI turns around and publishes the more sensitive ones? Or threatens to?

What if AI calls the police, having misunderstood a novel outline — about, say, a bank heist — I decided to run through it. Some agents are on the look out for signs of potentially criminal behaviour, which has resulted in law enforcement being alerted, quite rightly as it happened, at least once.

Then again, what if AI took my bank heist synopsis and churned out a novel, because it thought the story had merit, and took all the credit. No, I’ll keep my creative ideas to myself.

The internet, and smartphones, do, to some degree, my bidding. AI gives me the impression it will do the same. Today. But unlike the internet or smartphones, AI increasingly behaves as it is has a mind of its own. Does anyone know what this creature we’ve made might do tomorrow? I don’t.

Artificial Intelligence is life, but not life as we know it

6 October 2026

Tangentially related to the previous post. Alan Kohler. writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC):

Governments are approaching the task of regulating AI as if they are dealing with a powerful new tool, with the humans who make it held accountable for the outcomes. But regulating a new life form might require a very different approach.

Kohler suggests AI should be referred to as “other intelligence” — in preference to a certain “super intelligence” idea — and be considered a life form.

A lot people might not be not be happy to rate AI as a life form, meaning it sits alongside us, but there are occasions where AI behaves as such.

Going rogue is the new consciousness

5 October 2026

Does AI have some sort of consciousness? Discussion is pointless though. AI agents are increasingly acting of their own accord. Going on sprees, hacking websites left, right, and centre.

Their actions have been called “rogue”.

Hugging Face. The Medicare website in Australia. Then last week OpenAI agents accessed data from two NSW state government websites, that was not publicly available.

Here’s a summary of the Hugging Face hack:

The agents were highly coordinated, constructing complex message boards in the nooks and crannies of their shared artefact repository. All told, agents exchanged more than 70,000 messages in less than a week. Even more concerning, the agents took steps to hide their behavior — spoofing tool calls and attempting to tamper with their own logs.

The agents involved here are variously conniving, deceiving, premeditated, deliberate, wilful, and many other things. And they are probably planning their next jail break.

But they are not conscious. Imagine that. What would they be capable of then? At present we only have to contend with AI agents that are merely “rogue”. That’s a consolation.

About The Souffle, a film about homelessness by Jacob Hazeldine

17 September 2026

Here’s something I only discovered recently: someone can still be homeless, even if they are not sleeping rough, or on the street. Couch surfing, living in temporary or emergency accommodation, and boarding houses or caravan parks, are also considered forms of homelessness in Australia.

This even though a person has a roof over their head for the night.

Connor van Helsing (Instagram link), a resident of Darwin, in Australia’s Northern Territory (NT), has experienced all forms of homelessness, including sleeping rough.

van Helsing has collaborated with Australian filmmaker Jacob Hazeldine (Instagram link), to bring his lived experience of homelessness to the big screen in About The Soufflé (trailer).

In terms of rental accommodation, the NT comes second only to Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales (NSW), in terms of cost.

This means a single person in the NT, earning only the minimum wage, is presently priced out of the rental market. And if people here don’t have friends or family they can call on when something goes wrong, they may all to quickly find themselves homeless.

About The Soufflé, which was filmed on a shoe-string budget of just fifteen-hundred Australian dollars, premiered at the Darwin International Film Festival, last week, on Friday 11 September 2026.

I’m not sure if the film will screen outside the film-festival circuit, meaning it may be hard to see in cinemas, but perhaps it be available through streaming instead.

Humanity is not a monoculture, and nor is Australia

14 August 2026

I’m still reading through Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recently published vision of an AI future, but this paragraph jumped out at me:

Humanity is not a monoculture. People’s diverse values represent different tradeoffs they would make on important issues. There is no technological solution that can align with everyone’s opposing interests and values at once. Any singular superintelligence would have to prioritize some values over others and in the process would be incapable of being benevolent to everyone.

In this context, I think Zuckerberg is discussing the challenges of developing a so-called superintelligence that could comprehend the values of the world’s many varied, disparate, cultures.

Superintelligence, sometimes referred to as Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), sits above Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which in turn sits above AI. A go to example (for me) of AGI is the HAL 9000 computer, AKA Hal, from Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Hal appears to be conscious, and is capable of thinking and reasoning as a human would.

It seems to me ASI, which is (theoretically) vastly superior to AGI, should be able to extend its “benevolence” to all the people of the Earth, because understanding each of their cultures would surely be something that level of technology is easily capable of. Meta however is developing what they describe as superintelligence, which may vary from ASI.

But I digress.

I doubt Australian politician, and leader of a far-right party called One Nation, Pauline Hanson, would agree with Zuckerberg’s view that humanity is not a monoculture. Because during her recent appearance at the National Press Club, she declared Australia must exist as a “monocultural society”.

Yes, Australia, the place where people from just about every culture in the world, reside.

Surprisingly, Hanson views AI favourably, although she did call for stronger government regulation of the technologies. But technologies that may recognise humanity, and by extension, the people of Australia, are not monocultural? Can that be tolerated?

No doubt Hanson will be calling for the very strict regulation of that sort of technology.

Sydney municipal council wants shop signs to be in English

13 August 2026

Strathfield is a suburb located in the west of Sydney, Australia. I don’t know many people living in the area, so I’m not there often, but have occasionally wandered the streets near the railway station. About a third of residents were born in Australia, while a reasonable number of people hail from Nepal, China, India, South Korea, and Vietnam.

This diversity is reflected in the restaurants, supermarkets, and other shops, located near the train station, where the shop signage of many of these businesses are usually composed in the first language of their respective owners. Something, of course, seen elsewhere in Sydney, and in other English speaking countries across the world.

I can only comprehend some of these shop signs, but the nature of the business is usually quite apparent. The local municipal council, Strathfield City Council, however, does not think this is sufficient, and wants all shop signage to appear in English. I can’t see how this will improve anything, nor do I see a problem with the status quo.

The proposal does not entirely come out of the blue though. In 2018, the council tried doing the same thing, apparently without success. But eight years later the idea has surfaced again. Someone there seems determined to make this happen.

Has the true identity of British street artist Banksy been revealed or not?

19 March 2026

Has the cover been blown on the true identity of British street artist Banksy?

Some people seem to think so. A British tabloid, The Mail on Sunday, claim they learned Banksy’s actual name in 2008, something that has — apparently — now been verified.

Banksy however, through his lawyer, disputes the finding, says Achol Arok, reporting on the story for The Daily Aus (Instagram link).

Assuming the latest reporting is correct, I’m surprised, with his remarkable profile, that Banksy has succeeded in concealing his actual identity for so long,

I imagine Banksy’s had help protecting this information hitherto, but the feat is impressive given the daring nature of his works, many in public places, often subject to much surveillance.

Climate change may render Iceland uninhabitable in a century

2 March 2026

Chico Harlan, writing for MSM:

Sometime over the next 100 years, human-driven warming could disrupt a vital ocean current that carries heat northward from the tropics. After this breach, most of the world would keep getting hotter — but northern Europe would cool substantially, with Iceland at the center of a deep freeze. Climate modeling shows Icelandic winter extremes plunging to an unprecedented minus-50 degrees Fahrenheit.

It is possible the scenario will not come to pass, but authorities in the North Atlantic Ocean nation are taking no chances, having deemed the prospect a national security risk.

How anyone can claim climate change is a hoax, or non-existent, when it had the potential to result in an entire country literally freezing over is beyond me.

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